The weapon of choice for all radical ideologues is the manipulation of words and their meanings, and the latest target has been 'tradition.'
By Fr. John A. Perricone
Crisis Magazine
February 27, 2026
is a pity when a word dies. It is conceived in the womb of a certain culture, and it gestates in that culture until its meaning is set as firmly as the facets of a diamond. Words then become the privileged communication of truth to other men. If reckless men begin assigning different meanings to words, different from the meanings that they have borne over time immemorial, human communication comes to a halt. One man will mean one thing, still another man something completely different. Manipulating words weakens a culture, casts it into a spiral of disequilibrium. Chaos results.
Since totalitarians depend upon chaos, the manipulation of words is a paramount strategy. No thinker has analyzed this "death of words" with greater trenchancy than George Orwell. In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," he brilliantly demonstrates how vague, euphemistic, and simplified language narrows the range of human imagination and enables authoritarian power. Political language is designed to hide rather than express the truth. He believed that bad language can stem from poor thinking, but sloppy and dishonest language can corrupt thought.
Witness the Old Totalitarians in their recasting of words, draining them of their once exalted meanings: for instance, "the people's republic" and "liberation army." Words employed for generations, familiar and comforting words, which endeared and attracted, become infused with malignant new meanings meant to smother truth and deliver men into bondage.
Similar tactics are being borrowed today by the New Left. Formerly noble words such as diversity, inclusion, equity, compassion, and, dare we say it, love, have been taken hostage to serve as nooses around the necks of our culture. This whole project is designed to turn the minds of men inside out. Once accomplished, reality is altered just as the Overlords wish.
Closer to home, the once sacrosanct word "Tradition" has undergone a similar fate-but with a doubly dangerous manipulation. This eminent term's august place in the arsenal of Catholic dogmatic teaching first endured a kind of banishment. The avant-garde theologians of the first half of the 20th century found the Church's sacred Tradition to be suffocating and cramped. To them, it was nothing more than a ball and chain, restricting the emergence of a New Man and a New Church.
Thus, their project was to discredit the necessity of Tradition. With patience, their task succeeded by the mid-20th century. Success was achieved as a Catholic intelligentsia led a compliant hierarchy to a New Frontier. The Catholic Left's conquest was not a merely cerebral one. In order for their assault not to remain solely noetic, they needed to sunder the whole symbolic structure which fortified it.
Recall that sacred Tradition is accompanied by a whole galaxy of critical symbols-artistic, musical, vesture, language, architectural-which acted both as its protection and its transmitter. Put another way, sacred Tradition is like a tapestry: pull one thread and the whole masterpiece unravels. The analytic philosopher Wittgenstein appreciated this when he wrote that attempting to change the traditional meanings of a language (by extension, its symbolic structure) is like trying to undue a spider's web with boxing gloves-all is destroyed: meaning, language, and symbol.
More recently, another strategy was employed by the Theological Left. This one, more au courant. Rather than railing against Tradition, they would subtly alter its settled meaning. Fidelity to Tradition became fidelity to meanings foreign to its original meaning. Observe the title of one of Pope Bergoglio's motu proprios: Traditionis Custodes. With a swift use of legerdemain, Tradition no longer possessed the firm classical meaning it possessed for two millennia. Cast aside was the faithful continuance of denotations and connotations that had accumulated over centuries. Now, tradition was to mean a divorce from those millennial meanings. Replacing them: practices of a mere 60 years.
This is reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, "Words mean want I want them to mean." Yes, Lewis was a precursor of Orwell, sounding the warning of language's manipulation.
The sacred Tradition of the Church has undergone of kind of death in the past century. Contrast the Modernist project with the primordial and perpetual meaning as the settled truths handed by Christ to the Apostles: "O Timothy, guard the deposit, avoiding the profane novelties of words, and opposition of knowledge falsely so called" (1 Timothy 6:20).
Ah, the Deposit. A term at which the modern Catholic bien pensant chafe. The Apostle intentionally chose a word that denotes permanence, fixity, and boundedness. Not that it admits of no development, but never a development that makes it anything other than what it is, than what was already given. No one offers more precise and perfect expression to this notion of doctrine's development without change than St. Vincent of Lerins. It was in his famous Commonitory, written shortly after the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century:
Is there to be no development of religion in the Church of Christ ? Certainly, there is to be development and on the largest scale. Who can be so grudging to men, so full of hate for God, as to try to prevent it ? But it must truly be development of the Faith not alteration of the Faith. Development means that each thing expands to be itself, while alteration means that a thing has changed from one thing into another. The religion of souls should follow the law of development of bodies. Though bodies develop and unfold their component parts with the passing of the years, they always remain what they were. There is a great difference between the flower of childhood and the maturity of age, but those who become old are the very same people who are once young. Though the condition and appearance of one and the same individual may change, it is one of the same nature, one and the same person....
If, however, the human form were to turn into some shape that did not belong to its own nature, or even if something were added to the sum of its members or subtracted from it, the whole body would necessarily perish or become grotesque or at least enfeebled. In the same way, the doctrine of the Christian religion should properly follow these laws of development, that is, by becoming firm over the years, more ample in the course of time, more exalted as it advances in age...
On the contrary, what is right and fitting is this, there should be no inconsistency between first and last, but we should reap the true doctrine from the growth of true teaching, so that when, in the course of time, those first sowings yield an increase it may flourish and be tended in our day also.
It will be the First Vatican Council of 1861 which confirms the explanations of St. Vincent:
For the doctrine of faith which God has revealed has not been proposed, like a philosophical invention, to be perfected by human intelligence, but has been delivered as a divine deposit to the spouse of Christ, to be faithfully kept and infallibly declared. Hence also the meaning of the sacred dogma is perpetually to be retained which our Holy Mother Church has once declared: nor is that meaning ever to be departed from under the pretense or pretext of a deeper comprehension of them. Let then the intelligence, science and wisdom of each and all, of individuals and of the whole church, and all ages and in all times, increase and flourish in abundance and vigor, but only in its proper kind, that is to say, in one of the same doctrine, one in the same sense, one in the same judgment (cf. St. Vincent of Lerins).
This is a constant refrain in St. Paul:
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine: but after their own lusts shall heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears. And they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables. (2 Timothy 4:2-4)
Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle. (2 Thessalonians 2:15)
Quite a bit more forcefully, St. Paul again, in a manner that some higher clerics might find a bit off-putting:
And now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us. (2 Thessalonians 3:6)
Perhaps a third assault can be noted. More recently, the word Tradition has come to be used as an epithet for any Catholic who adheres to Tradition as defined by the Church. The insult has mutated into Traditionalist, a slur deserving Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter or the obligatory bell of lepers warning that they were approaching. This is hurled at Catholics as an obloquy for simply loving the Tradition and traditions that have defined Catholicism for millennia. Essentially, a Catholic who aligns himself with the Church and who accepts every infallible pronouncement as binding. Moreover, this fidelity extends to any who hold the conviction that the Sacred Liturgy ought to bespeak the splendors of Heaven, for it is here that sinful man is fed with the Bread of Angels.
These same Traditional Catholics are held in suspicion because they adhere to the Church's whole constellation of prayer and devotions which has marked the lives of Catholics for centuries upon centuries.
Too bad.
For every single Catholic bearing that name is a Traditional Catholic. Or no Catholic at all.
St. Paul would have it no other way.
This article was originally published on Crisis Magazine.